If a lion could speak,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “we could not understand him.” Swap “lion” for “octopus” and you have the philosophical challenge at the heart of this deeply interesting work of science fiction. What if the first alien intelligences we encountered were already living with us on planet Earth?
Rumours of sea monsters off the shores of an archipelago in Vietnam have attracted the attention of a tech giant specialising in AI, Dianima, which has bought and sealed off the islands. A marine biologist, Dr Ha Nguyen, is hired to investigate what might lurk in the water. She is joined at the isolated research station by Evrim, a sexless hyper-intelligent android built by Dianima, and the station’s security chief, a female war veteran named Altantsetseg who conducts a swarm of killer robots as though it were a symphony orchestra. It turns out that the octopuses do have a kind of garden in the sea, but no one is invited.
This is a near future of many pleasing inventions, from the witty to the horrific. Hatchling sea turtles are helped from beach to water by a tribe of robotic Automonks from Tibet, now a hi-tech power. People can buy AI romantic partners to be their “point five”, only half the fuss of a real human relationship. Some mysterious characters wear “identity shields”, obscuring their real faces with changing electronic ones, to avoid ubiquitous surveillance. And in the depleted oceans, ravenous AI-piloted fishing vessels use crews of abducted human slaves to process their dwindling catches.
The island research station has something of the claustrophobia and paranoia of the Antarctic research station in John Carpenter’s The Thing. In the outside world there is a young man, Rustem, who is a genius freelance hacker, much like the heroes of William Gibson’s early cyberpunk novels. Some characters can control insect-sized assassination drones, rather like the knife missiles in the novels of Iain M Banks. Nguyen’s attempts at communicating with the octopuses via symbols are reminiscent of Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, which was adapted as the first-contact movie Arrival. (In that film, the aliens are themselves rather octopus-like.)
But the book isn’t simply a mashup of other SF situations: it is also a novel of ideas – and with so much information, the reader can forgive the few times a character takes a deep breath and delivers a massive exposition-dump. A cleverer way to handle the freight of philosophical speculation about the nature of consciousness – both human and other – is the way that each chapter is prefaced by book extracts, such as one on potential marine intelligence supposedly written by Nguyen herself, entitled How Oceans Think:
“In the octopus we see opportunism, exploration, creativity – the qualities we associate with consciousness in our own mental life. We think we recognise a mind like our own. But this creature is nothing like us. The majority of an octopus’s neurons are in its arms, connected via a neural ring to a brain that can override, but does not always control, its maverick appendages.” If we couldn’t understand a lion, because its experience of the world was so different, what chance could we have with such a strange creature?
Of course we would be equally strange to it: a perspectival switch that the novel explicitly plays with. The Mountain in the Sea encourages the reader to dwell on our own species’ ecocidal depredations, and how they might look to an alien intelligence. “I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species,” Nguyen writes, “is that they will truly see us – and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust.”
Things do not end quite so pessimistically in this cerebral but not self-satisfied book that also features welcome episodes of comic relief and tightly choreographed action. It is oddly refreshing, too, to read a novel by an American writer that is global in scope yet in which no single scene takes place in the continental US. (Nayler has worked across Asia for the US government, and currently lives in Kosovo.) It is successful entertainment as well as a warning. As the novel’s version of Dr Frankenstein says: “The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”
• The Mountain in the Sea is published by W&N (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
